mass mail() and timeout prevention

holstead

I have a client wanting to send a newsletter to multiple clients...sometimes up to 500 at a time. I've seen scripts that loop through each customer and call the mail() function for each instance, then calling sleep(3) after x amount of emails have been sent to prevent mail server timeouts. There is also the option to have multiple recipients for each mail() call.

What is the best solution for a newsletter that goes out to, lets say 1000 people at a time? And...what factors determine this? (server timeout settings? php performance? server performance/variables?)

Of course i'm asking this because I dont want to have him send out hundreds of emails and have half of them bounce or fail.

Server is your typical cpanel/linux/apache/php/mysql box.

Thanks for any advice.

drew010

if you are only going to send it out to 500 or so people, you should be able to write a php script to just run one mail call for each address without having any problems. when you call the mail function in php, it just pipes the data to the local mail transfer agent specified in php.ini, it shouldnt timeout or overload, it will probably just queue the messages. php isnt the greatest language for mass mailing, you should use c so you can multithread and contact the remote mail server yourself. but since its a small mailing a simple loop over all the people should work fine. i created a php command line bulk mailer a while back and have sent out close to 50,000 messages per run and all addresses that were not full or inexistant received the email. if you are interested, contact me and i can share the program with you as well as few few tricks to determine who received your messages.
but the best way is to use a professional bulk mailer written in vc++ such as darkmailer, or supermailer. those programs will tell you real time if the user received the message or not by directly reading responses back from the remote mail server.

sfullman

Hi drew,

I'm interested in that mail program you mentioned, I've already run 10,000 emails with big attach's but it takes a while. could you PM me sometime or post some links here and I'm willing to pay you a modest amount for your time as well.

Sam Fullman

(P.S. See my recent post on multithreading too)